I fell on my head and the world broke, or at least that’s how it feels.
Each of these things are true:
I fell on my head.
The world broke.
It’s the “and” that makes a difference I guess.
I woke up to six firefighters. One of them had my legs, one had my left arm. Two of them held the door of the coffee shop open, another was just above my head, and the last one was just a voice from somewhere over by the napkins.
In one version of this I woke up in a puddle of coffee, but I don't know if that’s the reliable version. I do know that I would smell coffee on my skin and in my backpack for the rest of the week.
They, the firefighters, want me to go to the hospital. They say I have a cut above my right eyebrow that might need stitches.
“Stitches?” I say accusingly. I don’t feel any pain. There is no blood that I can see. “Can’t I just go grab a band-aid at CVS?”
“We can’t leave you here laying down on the sidewalk. We need you to at least be able to sit up.”
“OK,” I say, sitting up. They help me. I am hooked to a blood pressure cuff. It reads 75/50. I feel sick, but not in my stomach. It feels like my throat wants to vomit and the rest of me is unconvinced.
One time I thought I had been drugged. Another time, after a run, I sat down on the floor of the shower and thought about what would happen if I just left the shampoo stay in my hair, forever and ever amen.
Most of the time it’s on a plane.
I had started watching “Hidden Figures” and ordered the pink sea salt popcorn from the touchscreen. It was a redeye because I don’t like to waste time in the air, but it had been a busy few days in LA before I officially moved there and I probably should have caught up on sleep instead of snacks. Tequila and dancing in West Hollywood plus one male go-go dancer who pulled me aside and asked for my number, minus the In N Out I got after an audition, divided by the rental car I dropped off near the airport where I almost lost my housekeys and somewhere in the math of this I figured it must have been food poisoning.
Halfway through the popcorn I started sweating. Sweat in between my toes and all through my hair. Dripping off my face like it was August in Indiana on the porch before it rains. I stripped off my sweater, stuck my face in the donut of my neck pillow and breathed through my mouth.
Everyone was asleep; it was a redeye after all. I spit imaginary bile out of my throat because it seemed like it would help if I could just be sick. If I could get it out, make it real, commit. Just.
I fell asleep. Woke up freezing with hair that smelled like sweat and a still-dizzy feeling in my neck. Otherwise I felt fine.
This is how it happens, until it happens in public where people are awake.
The firefighters had been at the front of the line when I walked into the coffee shop, and there’s usually no line at all. Just me and the barista who seems annoyed that it’s me. Instead, it was the day before New Year’s Eve and the whole world had time for an afternoon break.
The guy in front of me was wearing a baby who he talked to in a baby voice and I can only imagine if the baby had an actual voice it would be to tell the dad to stop.
“Are we going to get gingerbread cake? Are you excited about gingerbread cake?” The dad sang as he moved the baby’s arms around the way I used to do to our poor cat, Rebecca, who I named a person name because I wanted another friend.
The baby drooled. The baby did not have teeth, nor could it have gingerbread cake. The gingerbread cake charade felt like it was for my benefit, as a person with teeth, but I was annoyed that the baby was being used in the process. And I was starting to feel too warm.
I took off my jacket, but it didn't help. By the time the dad puppeteer had reached the counter, I was wearing a tank top, carrying my sweatshirt, jacket, and backpack.
“How’s the gingerbread cake?” The dad asked the barista. “Is it good? I bet it’s good.” This last part he said as the baby and bounced its arms again.
Sweat pooled, cold and unhelpful, under my hair and along my top lip. If I could sit down before my neck decided it didn’t care to carry my head, I could wait this out. The dad wanted me to smile and wave at the baby and the prized cake but I gave a troll’s grimace and held the edge of the counter as I placed my order.
The guy behind me was standing too close. Everything was too loud like it was happening inside of a metal barn instead of these brick walls. The card reader wasn’t working but I didn’t see because I had crouched under the counter in a tiny squat.
“Have you seen the Mandalorian yet?” The tall guy who had been behind me asked the barista who had moved on to this man’s order. This guy now effectively blocked me into my little spot under the counter.
“Yeah man, I finished it in two days,” said the barista to the man. “Oh it looks like it didn’t go through.” This, to me.
I popped back up from my squat to try the card reader again. There sat my coffee in my reusable mug, a glass water bottle I had decided on at the last second, and beyond that a conversation about Disney+ as a concept and a revelation. I crouched back into my squat.
“Hey, she doesn’t look so good,” said someone farther back in line.
“It happens sometimes,” I mumbled. “I just need to sit for a second.”
“Yeah, Disney+ is blowing Apple TV away,” said the tall guy.
I knew if I could just get outside, there would be benches and I could sit with my head in my hands and let my neck be weak and think about spitting into the void and this would subside.
“Did you see the new Star Wars movie,” the barista asked the tall guy.
I made a break for it. I grabbed my coffee, the water bottle, all my articles of clothing slung on my arm, my backpack half open in the crook of my elbow, and headed for the door.
And then I woke up.
Eleven external stitches, four internal, a fractured brow bone, and a concussion. The firefighters insisted I go to the hospital, which I did - albeit strapped to a stretcher in an ambulance by said firefighters - and at the hospital I learned the cut above my eyebrow actually went down to the bone, and could not, in fact, have been closed by a band-aid from CVS.
After about ten days, the concussion symptoms lessened. The pulsing sensation throughout my eye socket has now gone down considerably, although I did a headstand last week and then my eye twitched uncontrollably for a whole day so I’m not quite right yet. And there’s a second or four every day where it feels like the world splits open.
One time I was reading a news article and it looked like the font was crooked and offset all over the page. Another time I thought we were having an earthquake in the middle of class but no one felt it. But most of the time it’s like a quick flash, the fabric of the air ripples, and I wonder if this is all pretend.
I fell on my head and the world has broken and it keeps breaking for those four seconds every day and it cannot possibly be real that we are in the middle of a pandemic with a mysterious disease that spreads silently and exponentially and if this is how the world ends then maybe I never really woke up that day on the sidewalk at all.
A concussion jostles your brain and alters your reality and it’s been most helpful to talk to other people who have had a head injury. But none of them had one right before the world broke so I don’t know about the part where I feel insane.
“Your scar looks so good, I can’t even see it,” they say.
“Thank you, that’s because I went to the plastic surgeon,” I say, which is true. I’m missing half my fingers but I still don’t want to look like the knockoff Harry Potter figurine they sell at Big Lots, and that is where I was headed after the ER.
The ER doctor leaned in close when she met me.
“Are you in the industry,” she whispered. My first thought was bartending, but this isn’t Boston and that isn’t my industry anymore, and I’m just some girl they found lying on the concrete.
I frowned.
“Are you an actress,” she whispered, but louder.
“Why, cuz it’s my face?”
“You haven’t seen this yet, have you?” She took a photo of my gashed open forehead with my phone and this is when I realized where the headache I’d complained about was coming from.
The morning that they detonated a device at the end of our street is when I found out we were on lockdown. After the Boston Marathon bombing, we spent the week surrounded by SWAT teams, and road closures, and altered hours. I lived eight blocks from the first blast site, and that Friday morning, when they found another device and the city shut down and the manhunt started, I had exactly one bag of chips and a six-pack of Downeast cider in the apartment and no way to leave.
Three weeks ago, when the first murmurs of lockdowns came up, is when I started my quarantine shopping. I don’t have a car and canned food is heavy and I will not repeat my food choices of 2013 if I can help it. It’s all quite weird and overwhelming if you look too far ahead, but the steps to get to the future are the only things we can count, and so I have a bunch of chickpeas and some cough medicine.
“I’m so glad you’re ok,” I am told, but I don't feel ok. I feel like I left something there on the ground or in 2019 or back on the plane. I am sorry I pretended to be fine, that I pushed through and went to work in the way that we are all discovering is unsustainable now, but the things that make me me are the very same things that made me think a band-aid would fix the whole ordeal.
“You passed out on us twice,” the firefighter holding my feet says, but I don’t remember either of those times.
I remember the coffee in streams around my head but sometimes I remember being face up and sometimes it’s down. I hit both sides of my head somehow but I don’t know where. No one was watching and they can’t tell me.
The glass water bottle is intact. It survived the fall and no one can tell me why and I never actually got my coffee. I have so many questions and there are too many lucky things about this story but now everyone is scared and everything is wrong.
I don’t feel pain until it makes me sick.
And.
Now the world is broken.
And.
I don’t know where you find stitches to save humanity at CVS.